What could be the basis of our having more inherent value than animals? Their lack of reason, or autonomy, or intellect? Only if we are willing to make the same judgment in the case of humans who are similarly deficient.
Interpretation
The quote questions the basis of human superiority over animals based on traits like reason and intellect.
Tom Regan's quote challenges the notion that humans have inherent value over animals due to characteristics like reason, autonomy, or intellect. By questioning this assumption, he prompts us to consider the moral implications of how we value all beings, including those humans who may also lack these attributes, thus advocating for a more egalitarian perspective on life and its inherent worth.
In practice
During a debate on animal rights, this quote can highlight the inconsistency in how we evaluate beings.
The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways, have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not only in the world, they are aware of it. What happens to them matters to them. Each has a life that fares better or worse for the one whose life it is.
It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands...but empty cages; not traditional animal agriculture but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of dead animals; not more humane hunting and trapping, but the total eradication of these barbarous practices.
It is not an act of kindness to treat animals respectfully. It is an act of justice.
I would encourage them never to forget that they were not always vegans. The self-righteousness of the recently converted hurts, it does not help, other animals.
My belief is that I wasn't born into Judaism by accident, and so I needed to find ways to honor that.
We are in an age of religious complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations, and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart.
Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.
Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty three degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind.
Perhaps fate isn't blind after all. Perhaps it's capable of fantasy, even compassion.
Events can neither be regarded as a series of adventures nor strung on the thread of a preconceived moral. They must obey their own laws.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.